First is not the Best

I was listening to the legendry story of the Scottish king and the spider in the cave, as my little Joe was wrestling with his English text book. For the spider, only the seventh attempt was rewarding. Are ensuing attempts more powerful? I asked myself. As I examined live examples one by one, I had to believe that successive attempts are usually more powerful. I concluded that the more one tries the more one accumulates some extra energy and so the first need not always be the best. 

Winston Churchill was once estranged from his political party over ideological disagreements. This wild appraisal on his integrity was enough to raise his self and he ended up his career as Prime Minister of Great Britain. ‘Too stupid to learn anything’, this was the comment passed by Thomas Alva Edison’s teachers. May be because of this that he could earn more than 1,000 patents in his name. Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first television job as an anchor in Baltimore, but Winfrey rebounded and became the undisputed queen of television talk shows before amassing a media empire. Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor alleging that he ‘lacked imagination and had no good ideas.’ Steven Spielberg was twice rejected by the University of California, School of Cinema Arts, but his ‘Jaws’ won three Academy Awards, later. Soichiro Honda's unique vision got him ostracized from the Japanese business community. Honda but could lead an automotive revolution in Japan. Colonel Harland David Sanders was fired from dozens of jobs before founding Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), which is one of the most recognizable franchises in the world. As a child, Albert Einstein had some difficulty communicating and learning in a traditional manner. It’s the same dizzy boy who later won the Nobel Prize in physics with his theory of relativity. J.K. Rowling was a poor single mom when she began writing the first ‘Harry Potter’ novel. Rowling is now internationally renowned for her seven-book Harry Potter series. Charles Darwin was considered an average student and was going to school to become a parson. We see that his writings, especially ‘On the Origin of the Species’ fundamentally changing the world of science. 

In all these cases we find that there were mighty motivating reasons that kindled the fire within, be it pure struggle for existence, a challenge from the community, a wrong remark from around, an obstacle or a failure of some sort. If King Robert Bruce was thrilled by the seventh jump of the spider, we have with us persons who have jumped more than a thousand times. While developing his vacuum, Sir James Dyson went through 5,126 failed prototypes. It was Henry Ford’s 5,127th prototype that clicked. Whenever I roll through stunning stories of people who could accumulate the extra energy, I feel sorry for a generation which believes in shortcuts and which falls dead even before an energetic first attempt. The facts say that it is from challenges and failures that this success deciding extra energy ooze out to the system. What the world needs is a generation which takes failures and challenges in its’ good spirit. For most of us, repeated attempts or a series of disappointments are always personality degrading processes. 

Joseph Mattappally